


wear it like bones, like skin

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, Nail Polish, Sparkles, basically femme everything, femme Cecil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-26
Updated: 2013-09-26
Packaged: 2017-12-27 17:26:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/981635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Cecil has about a million different sparkly nail polishes, and Carlos is a terrible scientist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wear it like bones, like skin

**Author's Note:**

> For thingswithwings and Toft!

_mercury twilight_

Carlos looks up one afternoon and finds that Cecil's fingernails scatter light. Or possibly, lure it down a darkened alley and smash it until it shatters so the reflection is wonderful and piecemeal, tiny patterns moving across the ceiling as Cecil moves his hands. Watching him lying on the top of the couch with feet outstretched, finishing the job on his toenails with intense concentration, his tongue showing at the corner of his mouth, Carlos is lovingly and helplessly reminded of the possibilities of darkened alleys. The light shifts and Carlos smiles: sometimes Night Vale's multiple oddities are, like Cecil himself, strange and beautiful. 

"That's lovely," he says, almost unconsciously, and Cecil looks up for a moment and smiles. 

Carlos is writing an email to his sister on his iPad, in somewhat stilted fashion – in reply to his last full-screen screed, she replied with merely, _aha, the purple-prose stage of the new relationship_ – and he's surprised when she ignores his three or four measured paragraphs on how he's doing and how the work is going and replies immediately to his postscript:

_omg Carlos ask him where he got it I only saw it my semester in England promise you won't forget ask him_

Blinking, Carlos looks up. "Cecil," he asks, uncertainly, "your nail polish. Is it" – he pauses – "from outside of Night Vale?"

"eBay," Cecil mutters, not lifting his eyes, still concentrating. "A girl in Texas."

"Oh," Carlos says. "I thought – well. I am a terrible scientist."

His sister says almost exactly the same, by return.

*

_neptune sea_

If not being a terrible scientist is about not making assumptions, Carlos is having a bad week. He's waiting for Cecil to finish up in the radio station for the evening, not quite listening to Cecil and Dana talk as they pack up, running over some ideas in his head for his next expedition to find the clock tower, when he catches the tail-end of something Dana is saying.

"Excuse me?" he says, and they both turn to look at him, surprised. "What are you talking about?"

"Nail polish," Dana tells him, with the tilted-head look she reserves for hooded figures and those who state the obvious. She's holding a bottle of something in a sort of blackish mottled colour that needs something – magnets? surely not – to work. She seems delighted at the prospect of trying it. (Although how nail polish can be a thing that works, and does not work, like a piece of lab equipment or an algorithm, is something that’s still opaque to Carlos. He's really a terrible scientist and he really needs to start paying attention.)

"You said…" Carlos hesitates. "Where did you get it?"

"I think – was it Macy's?" Dana says, and Cecil nods. "Yeah, Macy's. Although it wasn't me, it was Cecil. I'm borrowing it."

"Are you sure?" Carlos says, now thinking confusedly about magnetic north, and his worldview currently in slow precession around it. 

"I'm pretty sure," Cecil says, giving him a slow, kind smile, as though humouring him, "although you're quite right that Dana and I borrow and lend quite…"

"Macy's," Carlos says wildly, and sits down for a moment. "Cecil – you've left Night Vale? I don't mean, like… Franchia, and Luftnarp, and places."

"They're perfectly respectable places," Cecil says, aggrieved, but Dana talks over him, looking directly at Carlos.

"Yes," she says, as though daring him to make something of it. "Yes."

"Cecil," Carlos says, quickly, thinking it through. "Can I… may I buy you a bottle of nail polish?"

"That would be very thoughtful of you," Cecil says, gently, and if he's confused at the sudden offer, he says nothing about it.

*

_no place like chrome_

Dark Owl Records turns out to have a full rack of nail polish bottles in the back, bright colours, dark colours, pastels, metallics. Carlos is about to chalk this up as another of Night Vale's eccentricities when he remembers the small-town record store where he grew up had nail polish too, arranged in just that same haphazard way, together with obscure band shirts, iron-on Metallica patches and eyeliner in shades of black, black, and black. He wonders if that's why, really, they're here: because of something from Carlos's childhood, something that happened a long way from Night Vale, to a child who really wasn't, purple prose notwithstanding, very much like Cecil. 

"Oh, spring colours!" Cecil says, delightedly, and Carlos grins, fondly. He lets Cecil start making his way through the racks, leans against the wall, and thinks. On the drive over Carlos asked the questions he wanted to ask and Cecil answered him, easily and cheerfully, talking about visiting New York, and San Francisco, and less recently, parts of Canada, and there was nothing about stone arches or distant howling monsters, but there were things about bookstores, and coffee shops, and neon shades at Sephora. Carlos tries to imagine it but can't, Cecil walking down ordinary city streets, sitting on benches next to dog parks, looking out over the ocean. 

He looks down, finds his hand has closed on a small bottle. He holds it up to the light, admires the mirrored silver, and imagines, for the first time for all Cecil is becoming as much a part of his life as breathing, what it would look like on his own hands. 

Cecil catches his eye and smiles. "That one, then."

Carlos pays for it and watches the store clerk put it in a paper bag, and thinks again about Cecil's bare feet curling on beach pebbles, glossy with saltwater, shining.

*

_stargazer_

Carlos's sister has finally got around to asking the questions that maybe traditionally should have come before digressions into holographic nail polish, like _you have a boyfriend yay!!! omg what's he LIKE? Is he pretty?_

 _Very_ , Carlos replies, just the one word, and looks up at Cecil, who is sitting in an armchair with a book, holding it with one hand while the other hand cards absently through his curls, his nails now a sparkling green shade, vivid and beautiful against the dark of his skin. He's wearing a Night Vale community radio T-shirt and scrappy old jeans. There's still the hint of chipped glitter at his toes.

"You would be," Carlos says, suddenly, "the way you are, anywhere."

Cecil inclines his head. "Of course, dear Carlos" – as though it's an obvious statement, as though no one could ever be otherwise. But then, Carlos thinks, Cecil would think so, and makes a decision.

"Will you paint my nails?"

Cecil looks at him for a moment. "Of course. What would you like?"

Carlos considers. For some reason he's remembering his sequence of exes, his generally amiable break-ups with boyfriends who were all scraps of nerdish intensity much like himself; he's never gone for femme. But then, it makes perfect sense that Cecil should have brought beauty into his life, as casually as he carries it himself. 

After a moment, he nods his head determinedly. "Toes," he says. "You pick the colour."

Cecil picks a glitter topcoat, and paints directly onto his nails in small specks of silver and gold. He does it with skill and precision, and the unfamiliar chill of the brush makes Carlos shudder, but he doesn't mind: it's like they're building a wealth of something, layer by layer. 

_MORE_ , says his email.

 _Well_ , Carlos writes, making Cecil hiss and tell him to hold still, _you'll just have to meet him yourself._

He thinks about that, walking down the streets of his hometown, hand-in-hand with Cecil, brown-eyed and sparkling. Cecil isn't afraid of anything. It will be wonderful.

*

_southern lights_

And that night, late, Carlos looks up and Cecil is standing in the doorway to their bedroom, with nothing but sparkle between the desert night air and all the smooth surfaces of his body. Carlos swallows very hard and follows, pausing after each step, looking in wonder at his own feet. In the dim light of the room, everything shines, and Carlos takes each of Cecil's fingers into his mouth, one by one, breathing in dim peardrops, tasting the glitter against his tongue.


End file.
